


To Hell with Bruce

by ZenyZootSuit



Series: Self-Indulgence [3]
Category: Ozark (TV)
Genre: 1x01 Sugarwood, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Coda, Episode Tag, Established Relationship, Implied Sexual Content, Internal Monologue, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:08:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23498008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZenyZootSuit/pseuds/ZenyZootSuit
Summary: When Del came to Chicago with the intention of pulling his infamous Pablo Escobar routine, he hadn't been expecting it to turn out like this.
Relationships: Marty Byrde/Camino Del Rio
Series: Self-Indulgence [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1691215
Comments: 9
Kudos: 43





	To Hell with Bruce

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by demetrifever123 after they gave me a nudge to write more for this pairing. Written during the Covid-19 quarantine of 2020 because if there was ever a time for self-indulgent bullshit, it's now. Hope you enjoy it! Canon-typical warnings apply, this is the cartel we’re talking about here.

*******

Marty was right. He had been fishing.

That wasn’t to say though that he didn’t know something was off somewhere in the Navarro operation when he made his way to Chicago. His boss had made him painfully aware of a pattern of minor inconsistencies and had tasked him to flush out the rot by any means necessary.

His decision to start with Marty Byrde was first and foremost a joke. The advisor had always hated what he called Del’s “Pablo Escobar routine”.

_“Really, it’s beneath you,” Marty had said more than once, exasperated. “You need people to be afraid of you, just turn on the fucking news. Why dirty your own pristine image and thereby risk dirtying your whole operation by doing the grunt work yourself?”_

_Del shrugged. “Sometimes people just need a little reminder in the moment, you know? Also, it’s fun.”_

_The advisor rolled his eyes. “You need to get a day job.”_

_“You know,” Del replied, voice taking on a serious edge. “You should count yourself lucky that I let you talk to me like that.”_

_Marty stared at him blankly until Del laughed it off._

_“You’re not funny,” the accountant said._

_“I think I’m funny.”_

Needless to say, Del continued to pull his little routine first and foremost because it got reliable results, but also because Marty’s reaction was always _hilarious_.

Besides the fact that when he was pissed, he was much easier to goad into being rough. Marty, never anything but painfully careful, never forgot exactly who Del was and was therefore hard to convince at times.

_“You want me to…like that?”_

_Del let his head fall back on the bed as he let out a huff of exasperation. “Yes, how many times do I have to say it?”_

_“It’s just that you’ve never—“_

_“Marty, how many years have we been doing this? Eight years? I think we’re past all of this. Now are you going to get over here and fuck me or do I have to do it myself?”_

That was Del’s plan. Pull his routine, annoy the piss out of Marty, scare the shit out of the associates his dear advisor _insisted_ on keeping around, and fuck him senseless in his upscale hotel room before enlisting his help.

Marty was not only the best money launderer the cartel had, but also the best at sniffing out loose ends. If there was something to find, invariably he found it.

_“Going to Chicago, are you?” his wife had asked him the night before he left._

_Del winked, eliciting a laugh from his wife._

_“Have fun~”_

But he was not having fun.

_This wasn’t how this was supposed to go._

He had greatly enjoyed setting it up. Calling in Bruce and his fiancee and the two truckers. Sitting them down, scattering his burliest men about the room as he leaned on a desk, watching them all sweat.

 _Hilarious_ , right? Marty was gonna pitch a fit.

“Hey, Del.”

The drug lord turned at the sound of the advisor’s smooth voice, steady even under the greatest of pressures (and he was, honestly, happy to see the man).

“I didn’t know you were coming to town.”

Del shook his hand, clapping him on the back of the neck in greeting, fingers tangled in the hair at the nape of his neck (his dear wife had bid him be less obvious more than once. He had yet to take her advice). “You look good, Marty.”

The advisor nodded, face carefully neutral. “Well, thank you—“

“Where’s my five million dollars?”

The look on the advisor’s face was _priceless_ , Del had to work to keep his expression serious. He was going to tease _the hell_ out of him later for that face, if only he could have gotten a picture of it.

“Your _what?!_ ” The advisor glanced back and forth between his associates and Del. “Your five million dollars? What’s he talking about?”

“Have a seat.” Del nudged him towards the others with the hand on the back of his neck. Impulsively, he risked blowing the whole ruse by letting his thumb brush over the advisor’s pulse point as he let go.

He acted it out masterfully, if he said so himself. Going on and on about stolen money and his Aunt Carlotta, making the three other men and the girl shake in their boots while Marty stood, staring at him with an ever increasing look of displeasure on his face.

“I know what this is. I know what you’re doing,” the advisor scoffed, fixing him with a hard stare. “This is an intimidation audit. Yeah? You think you can just come in here unannounced at fucking, what, 11:30 at night and rattle some cages and someone’s gonna admit to skimming?”

Del smirked. _My brilliant advisor._

The money launderer went on. “I mean, you’re fishing,” he growled, well and truly pissed. “I get it, people steal, but you got a distribution chain run by meth heads and drug dealers, those are where you’re going find your Aunt Carlottas, not here. We’ve been laundering money for Mr. Navarro for ten years and you do this now? It’s a little insulting to be honest.”

Del had just been about to give it up, to crack a wide smile, burst out laughing and completely ignore the harsh way Marty spoke to him for the millionth time when Bruce’s voice stopped him.

“That’s right,” the man mumbled, a shaky edge to his voice.

Del braced himself for another one of Bruce’s speeches about trust, honesty, and good work ethic (he could probably recite it from memory at this point).

_Del would rather be doing anything else. Literally anything else other than sit at this company luncheon and listen to Bruce Liddell talk. But his boss had ordered him be here to see the new business expansion secured and to provide a face for the organization as well as a clear warning to anyone looking to get into mischief._

_He sighed heavily and leaned towards Marty (at least he got to see him). “Would you be angry if I shot Bruce in the foot?”_

_Marty glared at him, scandalized. “Yes!”_

_“Damn.”_

_Marty glanced at Bruce at the lectern before huffing a sigh and turning back to Del. “Look, he’s almost done. Then you can go about your day of subtly intimidating people or whatever it is that you when you’re not meeting with us here. Okay?”_

_Del cocked an eyebrow. The look on Marty’s face was carefully neutral._

_“Tonight?” Del asked simply._

_“Sure.”_

But, to Del’s surprise, Bruce said nothing more than that simple little statement and Del was suddenly struck by something of a bad feeling, so much so that he only half heard the rest of Marty tearing into him about involving a civilian and puling his little ruse on them.

“Ruse,” he said, cutting Marty off. “That’s a good word.”

There was a shifty look in Bruce’s eye. Del didn’t like it one bit. He slid off the table he’d been sitting on as he yelled for the men outside, deciding to test this just a little bit more.

The first few shots he fired through the bathroom door were deliberately meant to miss the girl in order to spook the men sitting out here, try and see if anything came out of shady Bruce or the trucker’s jittering son (he was many things but a mindless killer wasn’t one of them. Unnecessary death only sowed hatred and later treason. A shock here and there though…)

“It was Bruce’s idea!” the trucker’s son shrieked, terrified. “My dad had nothing to do with this!”

_Shit._

Marty stared at the three other men in horror before looking over at Del, white as a sheet. 

The next shot Del fired through the door was to kill. 

_This was not how this was supposed to go._

And to be honest, Del was _pissed_ , and not just because he’d uncovered disloyal stealing bastards in the Navarro cartel’s best money laundering operation. No, he was pissed because he had been looking forward to a very nice evening and now he had to shoot his lover of ten years and dissolve him in acid for something his foolish partner did.

“I told you no Bruce, Marty,” he lamented to the advisor knelt in the dirt, resigned to his fate for the moment as the old trucker begged for his son’s life. “But you wouldn’t listen to me. And now it’s a crying shame that you get taken down with him.”

 _This was_ not _how this was supposed to go._

_Damn it!_

If he had been a kinder, less selfish man, perhaps he would have shot Marty first to save him the shock of watching three men die, his best friend among them. But a drug lord was not known for being kind or selfless, now was he, so he shot the other three first.

Maybe he was just stalling.

In the end, Marty begged for his life (almost everyone did). He tried pushing a plan to take the operation to a place called the Ozarks and Del had known Marty long enough to know that he was pulling it out of his ass.

“I don’t want to kill you, Marty,” he said mostly to himself, only half listening to the ramblings of dead man walking.

The advisor was shaking when Del looked at him. “Then don’t. Let me make this right. I can do it. I can fix it. Just let me—“

Del sighed heavily, standing up. One didn’t become a top lieutenant of a cartel by being soft. “Here we go.”

His now ex-lover sagged, falling silent.

Del cocked the gun. He had his finger on the trigger. But for whatever reason, he didn’t pull it. For whatever reason, he knelt back down in front of the man, tapping him on the cheek to get his attention.

“Five hundred million in five years?”

Marty stared at him, stunned for a brief moment, before nodding quickly. “Yeah. Absolutely I can do that.”

And that was the biggest load of shit Del had ever heard, but then again Marty Byrde had surprised him before. He chose to believe him (because Marty Byrde made Camino Del Rio just a little bit soft).

*******

Not many people would have the negotiating skill and nuance to pull nearly eight million dollars out of an American bank in 48 hours, but somehow Marty managed it. The “nearly” in that statement, however, was a problem.

“What did I tell you?” Del asked as they sat at a panic table in a park somewhere, displeasure lacing his voice.

Marty stumbled over his words, saying something about it wasn’t a big deal, he still had to sell his remaining car —ahem— excuse him, top ranked minivan in the US.

Del chose not to remark on how if he sold both cars, how the hell was he planning on driving to his new home. “I’ll buy it from you for $27,000. So I owe you $20,000. Take that from the cash and I’ll lease the car back to you for…say $1000 a month.”

Some of the tension drained from Marty’s shoulders as he fixed Del with an unimpressed look.

“What?” the drug lord asked, cracking a smile. “It’s the top ranked minivan in the US.”

Marty snorted and perhaps that was nostalgia Del felt then, but probably not. More likely it was just inconvenience.

If Del had Bruce here right now, he’d kill him all over again for ruining his favorite friendship.

_I was supposed to have you in my bed by now. You were supposed to be tracking down the rot elsewhere in this organization, the rot wasn’t supposed to be you! And after you solved all our problems for the thousandth time I was supposed to invite you and your wife to our beach house. Elena was going to show your wife the cute little town so I could have you all to myself—_

_Fuck!_

The advisor balked when Del said he had to clean the 8 million.

“You’ll lose 15% right off the top. Another 25% in taxes _at least_ —“

“But that’s not the point, is it? I need to see that you can do it. I’m torn, Marty, between intrigue and thinking this is the biggest piece of straw-grasping bullshit I’ve ever heard.”

The advisor looked down at the table in front of them, not offering any defense as he waited for Del to finish his thought.

_Always waiting, so patient._

Del leaned forward and continued in a low voice. “Over the past ten years I have shielded you numerous times from the mistakes of others, but this is something I cannot and will not shield you from. I cannot put into words how much it disappoints me that you failed to see how _your own partner_ was stealing money from under your nose. It almost makes me wonder if you were involved.”

“I wasn’t,” Marty half hissed in reply, fixing Del with a hard look.

“Well, that could be true, but you always were a good actor. To tell you the truth, the only reason I’ve deigned to give you another chance rather than put you in the ground right next your your fuckup of a partner is because of the friendship we’ve shared. But I’m done protecting you, Marty. Either you get this done, or you’re done for, do you understand? And that includes Wendy, Jonah, and Charlotte. And not in that order.”

The advisor nodded quickly, not quite meeting his eyes as he shook Del’s hand.

The drug lord yelled to his men to put the money in Marty’s truck. Their backs turned, Del clapped his hand on Marty’s neck, running his thumb over the advisor’s jawline.

“I said no Bruce, Marty.”

The advisor said nothing, a faint flicker of hatred passing through his eyes.

That was fine, Del thought as he walked away. It wasn’t his job to be liked.

He hoped Bruce was rotting in hell.

**_El Fin_ **

**Author's Note:**

> A note on their relationship, I don’t think Del harbors any sort of romantic feelings for Marty at all. I think they’re as much of friends as you can be when one party works for a cartel and I think they have a mutually beneficial sexual relationship. Those two things put together over the course of a decade lead to some affection in a sense. I mean, you don’t carry out an arrangement like theirs that long if you can’t stand the other person, right? 
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it! I’m considering doing an AU of what would have happened had Bruce not blown their cover. We’ll see what I come up with.


End file.
